The present invention relates to problem solving, and more specifically, to methods and systems to identify changes in multiple resources related to a problem.
Within systems management, problems may arise that may require collaborative efforts to resolve. Collaborative efforts may include conference calls and/or online group discussions, such as virtual war rooms and group chats. The group chat may be a vital collaboration tool, yet group chat programs and application may not be built to handle intense and time sensitive discussions and/or a large scale discussion having multiple aspects to it, particularly for systems having a large number of resources. One solution to a large scale discussion is to create multiple virtual group chats at the same time to probe into different areas and/or resources. As multiple teams are divided up, there is more work or additional collaboration effort or tools that may be required to keep each of the separate groups connected and apprised of progress. One issue that may arise is that one group may not be able to easily and readily share information with another group as the other group may be part of a separate virtual war room. For example, one group may make changes related to a resource they are working with, but the group may not be able to easily notify all other groups of the change.
Historically a high percentage of problems (60-80%) that arise are due to failed changes within various resources. The change that causes a problem could be a change that went through a formal change process that ultimately caused the problem. Alternatively, the problem could arise from an out-of-process change where a user of one or more of the various resources of a system modified some configuration setting which resulted in the problem being formed.
As an example scenario, a problem may arise and a particular user may be asked if they made a change to a specific resource. The user may respond that they did not make any change. However, later in the process of solving the problem, the user may remember that they in fact made a change to the resource. The effect of a single user forgetting that a change was made to a particular resource may result in a severe impact on either the problem itself or on the length of time to resolve the problem.
One solution to this problem is to employ software that tracks changes made by users, which scan resources periodically to obtain a current configuration. The software can then compare the current configuration against one or more previous configurations to detect changes within the system(s). There are also different classes of products that are built to manage and understand particular types of resources, e.g., systems or devices. Such products may be configured to understand network devices and the associated detailed configuration and can detect changes thereto. All of these products have ways of querying for changes within the specific resource, with varying degrees of maturity and sophistication.
Problems may arise in an enterprise business application, which may be a very complex system that spans many different resources, e.g., domains, technical areas, physical systems, products, devices, operating systems, application, etc. It is normal to have components spanning multiple operating system(s) and/or distributed application component(s), middleware, software-as-a-service, on-premises software, network(s), physical/virtual servers, etc. In such situations and/or configurations, when a problem arises, multiple skilled persons may need to be gathered to understand the problem, track down symptoms, identify resources that could potentially be at fault, discover the real fault causing the problem, and then remedy it. This process can include upwards of 20-25 people and can take hours or days to resolve. For key business applications, this can cause significant financial loses. During this process, people may use tools specific to a resource to understand a change to that resource, and then the information must be collected to obtain a collective view of changes to all resources of the system. Such a process may be very time consuming. Further, due to the complexity of the systems, only certain or suspect areas may be consulted for changes, while other areas may not be inspected for changes, and thus certain resources may be omitted during a check for changes. As a result, multiple people may spend a significant amount of time trying to solve a problem.
Such situations may have direct bearing on the mean time to resolve a particular problem. Many problems are change-related and the lack of the knowledge that a user made a change may be a waste of time and/or resources, and prolong an outage to a business or operation. Thus, it may be advantageous to provide a system or application that can show a user all process or non-process changes that are related to any resource of interest uncovered through the problem-resolution process.
Some solutions require manual look-up of changes for each resource, and thus each resource must be reported on separately for all information and changes to be acquired for a check on changes within a complete system. Other solutions may be configured as self-contained systems wherein that every component of the system shares a common, normalized standard. That is, a single data model is implemented across all resources (e.g., systems, applications, operating systems, hardware, software, etc.) within the complete system. Such normalized/integrated systems are very difficult to implement, and may take years to evolve and be properly implemented in all aspects of the complete system.